Fifteen-year-old high school student Jack Andraka likes to kayak and watch the US television show Glee. And when time permits, he also likes to do advanced research in one of the most respected cancer laboratories in the world.

Jack Andraka has created a pancreatic cancer test that is 168 times faster and considerably cheaper than the gold standard in the field. He has applied for a patent for his test and is now carrying out further research at Johns Hopkins University in the US city of Baltimore. And he did it by using Google.

The Maryland native, who won $75,000 at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in May for his creation, cites search engines and free online science papers as the tools that allowed him to create the test.

The BBC’s Matt Danzico sat down with the teenager, who said the idea came to him when he was “chilling out in biology class”. How cool is that?

Do you know of other young students like Jack Andraka who have created remarkable and useful inventions? Can you really use Google to pioneer an advanced research like this? Tell us of your thoughts and opinions regarding his pancreatic cancer test and of your latest scientific exploits!

There’s a massive telescope on the drawing board that hasn’t even started construction yet, but when it’s finished in 2024, it’ll generate more data in a single day than the entire Internet.

For scientists to ensure they’ll be able to handle all that raw information, they need to start working on new computing technologies now. Fortunately, IBM is on it. The computing giant is collaborating with ASTRON (the Netherlands Institute of Radio Astronomy) to develop the next-generation computer tech needed to handle the colossal amount of data captured by the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), a new radio telescope that will spread sensing equipment over a span 3,000 kilometers wide, or about the width of the continental U.S.A.

The project is called DOME, and it’s challenged to find a way to capture and process approximately one exabyte every day, which works out to about twice the amount of data that’s generated every day by the World Wide Web, IBM says. To do that in a way that doesn’t consume a massive amount of energy, IBM will need to develop some entirely new processing architectures before construction on the telescope begins in 2017.

While the project has only just been announced, IBM already has some ideas in the hopper. Specifically, it’ll be looking at novel ways of stacking chips (today’s chips are flat, though stacking or “3D” tech is around the corner) and using optical technology for interconnects, something the company has already had some success with.

It’s possible the social networks and search engines of the future will be powered by IBM’s coming tech or something like it, enabling them to process an entire Internet’s worth of data for anyone and everyone.